Board Of Visitors
 | John N. Weinstein Professor and Chair, Dept of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology |
Dr. Weinstein obtained his B.A. in Biology at Harvard College, then an M.D. and a Ph.D. in Biophysics at Harvard University. His >270 publications include 11 as first author in Science and five in the last dozen years that have been cited in the literature >400 times each. His ISI H-score is 55. He has been nominated for the Institute of Medicine and for the National Medal of Technology as "a pioneer of the post-genomic era in biomedical science." After an internship and residency in Medicine at Stanford he joined the NCI and then headed the Genomics & Bioinformatics Group in the NCI's Laboratory of Molecular Pharmacology for many years. He is a Captain (retired), U.S. Public Health Service. In February 2008 he joined the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center to Chair the Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, with a joint appointment in the Department of Systems Biology for his wet laboratory.
For a number of years, his research focused on the development of novel approaches to therapy of cancer and AIDS using computational chemistry, large-scale compartmental modeling, and experimental methods in the development of liposomes, monoclonal antibodies, cytokines, and other "biologicals." In 1990 he organized and chaired the Gordon Research Conference on Drug Carriers in Biology and Medicine.
Since 1991, he has applied a mix of genomic, proteomic, systems biological, and bioinformatic tools to the pursuit of new biomarkers, new prevention strategies, and new therapies for cancer. His research program (for which he has coined the term ‘integromic') is part experimental, part computational. Using more than two dozen microarray platforms and other high-throughput technologies, he and his collaborators have generated interoperable molecular profile databases on cancer cells at the DNA, RNA, protein, chromosomal, functional, and pharmacological levels. Overall, it's the most comprehensive molecular profiling of any panel of cells to date. Potential clinical results have flowed from the molecular profiles and the analyses of them. For example, his analyses in the 1990's were critical to the go-no go decision for clinical development of oxaliplatin, now a standard agent for treatment of colorectal cancer.
To analyze and integrate the various databases, his group at the NCI developed a collection of widely used, web-based bioinformatic software packages, the "Miner Suite" (http://discover.nci.nih.gov). In the early 1990's, he introduced the Clustered Heat Map, which has since become the most common visual icon of the "postgenomic era." Recently, his group developed the SpliceCenter program package for analyzing splice variation in data from omic technologies. He has participated in the CGEMS genome-wide association studies and led two pilot projects for the NCI's Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG). He serves on the Steering Committees of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project and the M. D. Anderson Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy; the NCI Director's State of the Science Genome Group; the External Advisory Board for the Bay Area Breast Cancer SPORE; the Board of Visitors of the Texas Advanced Computing Center; and the Microsoft Technical Computing Executive Advisory Council. He is the lead PI (award $8.3 million) of a recently designated TCGA Genomic Data Analysis Center and the recipient of a generous grant by the Chapman Foundations for bioinformatics in the personalization of cancer medicine.